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Chapter 2

The Gift May Be the Wrapping

Saturday wakes me up with the sound of carts taking fish to market. Up past the Cowtown toll they meet other carts carrying all God’s living things, and dead ones too. Turkeys and chickens, turnips and onions, mackerels and cockles: anything you can kill and put in a pot is going off to get sold so that someone can eat it. I shove your shoulder a couple of times but you’re worn out from scouting so I’m first down to breakfast, except there isn’t any, because of Ma’s fright at the harbour. Ma sends me to Clowter’s for brisket. I hate John Clowter’s and she knows, but she never minds how I feel about anything. All those dead animal bodies hanging from Clowter’s ceiling, the rabbits stretched out like they were leaping away before they got bloody, the half pigs showing the side of their ribs no-one was meant to see, the chickens all naked and their white fishy eyes staring pure deadness, right into my heart like its own winter. I start upstairs to wak…

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How to evolve humanity? Person by person. Let’s heal trauma, master our emotions, and manifest a better reality. Warning: potentially triggering content. Please give yourself all the care you need, and shut this down if today is not the day. Sending love to all survivors.

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‘Why does it matter, when it doesn’t affect you?’

The porn site, Motherless, is what he’s talking about. The 20,000 videos of ‘sleep content’ where men have drugged their wives, girlfriends and fiancées so that they can rape them without their knowledge. Film them, stream them, upload the results. I contend that my husband of 25 years is a good man, but I know he doesn’t get it; doesn’t want to. On his terms, it’s simple: if it makes you upset, and it’s not directly affecting your life, look away. Stop reading about it. Tap away the anger. Turn your eyes to the sparrows squabbling at the feeder, hang out with your offspring who love you, watch comedy.

To be fair, this is my philosophy too. The only way to stay functional in the face of dark times is self-care. As a sensitive person, I’m shielded from the news by design. Two decades ago, I ditched the news in all its forms to stop my mood being buffeted by grief or anger at events I cannot control. That way lies paralysis, despair and ‘what’s the point?’ Somewhere in the world, we are always at war, there will always be disasters and damaged individuals, and I don’t want to end up like my mother-in-law, afraid to go outside. Then social media arrived, with my friends, and other writers, and its jokes and its memes and its cute puppy pics, and the news bled through.

I limit who I follow or click on; let the algorithm know to give me literature, comedy, therapy, easy on the politics. But, being connected to thousands of folk who aren’t buffered, the big stories make it to my timeline. On the whole, I resist. I label it ‘pain’ and don’t peel back the skin. Major horrors have glanced off my surface like sunlight on a lake. I don’t have a moral duty to incapacitate myself. I can’t afford to go there.

But the Pelicot case last year? That was different. It was something that felt essential to understand. The reality of the world we women are actually living in. That reality being so much worse than we knew. Women spend our lives conducting a seemingly endless series of risk assessments: avoiding that carpark, that badly lit street, that ground floor flat, that man, that dress. But none of us knew that our homes could be so unsafe. That, spurred on by the man we loved, our neighbours might rape us without our knowledge one evening, and the next day sell us a loaf of bread.

That felt like an important software update, one essential for every woman to install.

This ‘rape academy’ news is a patch on the update.

#eyecheck

In these videos, men film themselves lifting the closed eyelids of women to show they are sleeping or sedated, with some “eyecheck” videos surpassing 50,000 views. — ‘Exposing a Global ‘Rape Academy’

Women and girls live under the male gaze. I remember when it first landed on me, around 14 (later than some). For about three days, I was pleased: I hoped, after all, for a boyfriend. But you can’t control which males are gazing, or what they do next. The foul comments, the cat calls, ‘smile love’, ‘nice jugs’, ‘suck my dick, Blondie’. For the next thirty years, these intrusions randomly derailed my trains of thought. Never mind the stalking (more than once) and those men so persistent you’d end up screaming ‘fuck off!’ or faking a boyfriend or climbing out the bathroom window. Or on one memorable occasion, aged 33 (there was context), grabbing the guy’s nuts through his trousers and giving them a twist.

On the streets, I learned that if you accidentally look at a man, you’re increasing the chance he’ll harass you, and the habit of looking at my feet became so ingrained that, still to this day, Paul will say ‘Look up!’ Traditionally, the men who see women only as objects, they want you looking at them, when they say something crude.

But the rape academy men don’t want you to see them. They’ll drug you free of your shocked, accusatory look. They want the male gaze only; want other men to see them using you. They’ll put you under the gaze of strangers, in all your vulnerability: that turns them on. It shows they own you. They’re in control. They can film you and pimp you without your knowledge, monetise your humiliation. They find community with other men who share dosages to help them balance your life between unconscious and overdose.

There’s a personal reason I can’t close my eyes to the rape academies.

Echoes at Crater Lake

In 2015, I hired a sports convertible and drove from San Francisco to Ashland, Oregon. Drove up the Pacific Coast Highway with the roof down. A breathtaking drive that twice, driving through the stands of giant redwoods, filled me with such joy I had to stop and cry. I was on my way to present a paper at a conference and had chosen the drive to visit my childhood haunts around Berkeley first, and then, yes, have an unforgettable road trip.

Weird, that some stranger I’d met on a Marlowe forum, who lived in Ashland, had said in an email, when I mentioned my plans, ‘You don’t want to drive’. I said, ‘Yes, I do. You clearly don’t know me.’ He tried to put me off hiring a car — why not just fly? I ignored him. None of his business. “Over-protective” men, who think they know better than you (or think women can’t drive)'; I’d dealt with them all of my life.

He wanted to meet me. Sure. Why not? Fellow Marlowe enthusiasts are rare, and sharing a passion is often a pleasure. ‘Have a break from the conference after your paper,’ he suggested. ‘Instead of the conference buffet, I’ll buy you lunch.’ I pointed out that the lunchtime after you’ve delivered a paper is exactly when people will most want to talk to a person and say nice things, so no, “but you could join in the buffet?”

He introduces himself after the paper. He joins for the lunch. He’s easy on the eye and good company, but seems not so keen on hanging around with the others. He tries to persuade me to go with him somewhere else, “get away from these Oxfordians.” But I say, “I have friends here,” and also, papers I want to hear.

“Tonight?”

“There’s a theatre visit planned.”

“So when are you free?”

“Maybe the final evening,” I say. “Early evening, before the farewell dinner.”

Just ahead of that is a free afternoon. I’m planning to drive up to Crater Lake. The deepest lake in the USA, it’s more than a third of a mile at its deepest point, and apparently, unbelievably blue. So clear you can see 100 feet down.

“We should meet for a drink after that,” he says, and I say, “Okay.” The guy isn’t boring. We haven’t talked much about Marlowe. It seems pretty harmless.

On my way to Crater Lake, my phone pings. I pull off for a slice of cherry pie at a place recommended to me by a friend (too Twin-Peakish by nature to ignore) and read the message. The guy, confirming the venue. And can he pick me up?

—No, I’ll drive. I’ll just have one.

—What do you drink? Wine? Spirits?

Something’s tingling. Some deep, intuitive alarm bell.

—Why do you want to know?

—So I can have one ready for you when you arrive.

The alarm bell rings a little louder.

I shut down my phone. Finish my pie and get back in the car.

Heading for the lake, I’m barely noticing the view. I’m wrapped up in thoughts. He didn’t want me to drive. Even from the beginning, that email. He wanted to separate me from the people I knew, take me out of the conference. And now, he wants to know what I drink. Wants to have a drink “waiting for me.”

I begin to feel an energy, sexual energy. Like a plan, something he’s thinking about. I see myself, seeming drunk, barely able to walk, being taken into a garage where a bed is set up, and a camera. My sports car is miles away, at the saloon.

Now maybe it’s fear plus imagination. Maybe it’s instinct. Maybe it’s a premonition (I have had them before). But the feeling is growing louder and louder.

At Crater Lake, I get out of the car and walk onto the rim. Look into the lake’s blue eye. Its depth and its clarity. I will stay at the lake for a long, long time. I will not be going back for a drink.

This Wine Tastes Off

Because years before, I went for a drink with a charming stranger. A Frenchman. Good-looking. A year or two younger than me.

I was two years out of an abusive marriage, and still in the throes of a hostile, exhausting divorce. My kids had just gone to stay with their Dad for the first few days of the Easter Hols, and with some rare time to myself, I’d caught the train to London to meet some online friends in real life for the first time. Spring had finally arrived, and it was warm enough not to wear a coat.

I was walking through London’s Soho when he asked for directions. I was clear as I could be, but he didn’t understand me. It wasn’t far, and I had time, so I walked him towards the road he was after, and while we walked, we got talking. He asked if I’d join him for a drink. As a writer, I feel driven to say yes to unexpected plot twists, so long as they don’t look dangerous. Experiences can make material. So why not have a drink with a good-looking, charming Frenchman?

“Just a coffee,” I said to the barman.

We chatted for a while, then I had to set off for the pre-arranged meetup. “Maybe we can meet up later?” he said. “Can I have your number?” And I thought, why not? Perhaps this is the start of something fun, maybe even something good in my life. About time, surely, for something outside angry exes and disturbed little boys.

Meeting my online friends in person, in an upstairs bar, involved multiple Wizard-of-Oz moments: the curtain pulled back from screen names that possess a certain pizazz to find ordinary humans, stripped of their witty repartee. Some of us are better conversationalists with the buffer of time to think and edit. So I was happy to answer a call from an unknown number that came with a French accent. “Join us!” I said, but he was keen for me to leave them. “Spend some time just you and me.” In fact, he was waiting for me downstairs. We walked to a pub a few streets away, and he asked if he could buy me a Pernod.

“Half of cider,” I said.

“You sure you won’t try a Pernod? It’s very good. Very French.”

“No, I know Pernod. I’d rather have a cider.”

“Really? What about a glass of wine?”

I let him persuade me.

I went to the loo while he got the drinks. If you’re a woman reading this, you are probably already thinking Oh shit. You are correct. Bear in mind, I’d been locked in a marriage for a number of years, and was brand-new to 21st-century dating. MySpace and Facebook did not yet exist. I’d not seen coverage of this kind of thing in the news. No one was yet selling condoms to put over your drinks or spike testing kits.

When I got back, he was at a small table. I took one sip of the wine and said,

“This tastes off.”

“Are you sure?” he said.

I had another sip.

“Yep. Really weird. I’m going to take it back to the bar and get another.”

“I’ll do it,” he says, and does so. “Keep this table,” he says. Where the table is, while he’s at the bar, I can only see his back, and not what he’s doing. But I don’t know that I have to. He returns with a replacement glass of wine.

“Jesus,” I say, after taking a sip. “This is off, too. This bar serves terrible wine.”

“Maybe it’s just the brand of wine,” he says. “Maybe it’s meant to taste like that.”

“Well, it’s foul,” I say. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

I stand up and straight away, I know something’s wrong. I feel seriously drunk. What’s happening? I had a glass of wine at the other place, and only a few sips here. How can I be this drunk?

“Steady!” he says, and laughs. “You’ve had one too many.”

Have I? I can’t remember. This doesn’t feel right. Am I really this drunk, this quickly? Am I really such a lightweight? Something’s happening to me. He takes charge.

“You just need some fresh air,” he says. “Let’s go for a walk.” I’m swaying so much that he has to hold me up, and he’s laughing at how drunk I am. I’m laughing too. It’s ridiculous. I’m not sure what’s happening, but I like this man.

He helps me towards a main road, and suddenly I know where I am. Trafalgar Square. We cross to one of the giant lions. He climbs up on one and holds down his hand to pull me up. Now I’m sitting, facing him, straddling a lion, the iron cold through my trousers. He shuffles up close and holds me steady (because I think I might fall). He kisses me, and I don’t mind.

Which is weird, because I do. Because actually, I’m in love with someone. A brief affair from the year before that I haven’t got over. This guy’s got his tongue in my mouth, and my body’s responding, and the part of me that I would call me is like a tiny person trapped in a room at the end of a very long corridor shouting something I can’t really hear.

I break off and say, “It’s really cold.” He reaches into his jacket pocket, brings out a hip flask, and says, “This will warm us up.” He puts it to his lips, seems to take a sip, passes it to me, and I take a sip too. That Pernod he so wanted me to try. A strong taste.

He snogs me again, and now his hands have slipped under my top, are inside my bra, on my breasts, and my body’s just going along with it all, my body is keen, my body says Yes, mmm, Yes! and the part that is me, locked down the end of that long, ever longer corridor is shouting,

“You don’t want this! You’re in love with Luke! You love Luke, remember!”

I can hear it, I can, but it feels like there’s nothing I can do. That part’s not in charge. I’m going wherever this man wants to take me.

He helps me off the lion, and he takes me by the arm. Leads me into a nearby street, though I’m very unsteady, struggling to stay upright. It’s busy with revellers, and he’s weaving me through. “Where are we going?” I slur, and he says, “Somewhere quiet.” I know what’s coming next. A quiet back alley, somewhere dark, with just kitchen waste bins and no traffic. And I know, despite everything my body’s going along with, I know I don’t want it. But he’s stronger than me. And I’ve no strength at all. He’s gripping me tightly, both hands on one arm.

Then one blessed moment. A police car just yards away puts on its siren. The shock makes him loosen his grip, and as it wails past us, I tug my arm free, and run. Run in the same direction as the police car, back towards the one place I know in my drug-addled state. I say run, but mean stagger at speed, trying very hard not to bump into people. I make it to Trafalgar Square, and he hasn’t followed.

But I’m not safe. I have to get home. My overnight home, a flat in Streatham that my parents own. I find the right bus stop, and now, I’ve just got to stay conscious. But there’s nothing ‘just’ about it. The drug is heavy in my system and shutting it down. At the bus stop, I’m falling asleep on my feet, aware of the strangers around me judging me, a paralytic woman whose speech makes no sense, who can barely stand. The bus's arrival is a blessed relief. I need the top deck so I can see where I am. But now I’ve got a seat, somewhere to fall asleep, and my body is saying shut down, shut down. For the whole next hour, I’m fighting to stay conscious. My eyes keep closing, and then I’m asleep, but each time the bus stops, that tiny little me at the end of the corridor jolts me awake, check the stop, check the stop! I can hardly believe it when I finally see it, ring the bell, clatter down and out and through the doors, and I’ve made it.

But I haven’t. When I get to the flat’s front door, I realise there’s a problem. I have the key, but can’t put it in the lock. Because inside’s an alarm and the minute I go in, I’ll have 30 seconds to put in the number. A four-digit number.

I know this number. It’s easy. My mother set it. It’s the last two primes before 100. The last two primes before 100. We’re number people, my mother and I. “The last two primes, so you’ll never forget it.” That’s right, Mum. I’ll never forget it. Unless I’ve been spiked.

I slump down by the door. Last two primes. Last two primes. I can’t think of any.

I don’t know how long I’m slumped on the concrete walkway, losing consciousness, trying to do maths. Then they come! I know them! Key in the lock, numbers on the keypad, and door shut safely behind me.

I don’t get any further.

The next morning, I wake, still by the door, with my face on the doormat, in last night’s clothes, a metallic taste in my mouth. As soon as I was somewhere my body felt safe, it shut down.

I take myself into the kitchen, make a coffee in a slant of sunlight. Try to put together what happened. My phone’s out of charge, but once it’s charged up, I call the police.

GHB, the police surgeon reckoned. It leaves your system within 12 hours, so there was nothing to test, but she said that the symptoms added up. The sexual inhibition. The metallic taste. They asked me to do a photofit of the Frenchman, and I knew it was pointless, but showed willing nonetheless. Pointless because I have prosopagnosia. It takes me weeks of repeated exposure to learn a face.

A lucky escape.

Could have been worse.

Not rape. Not death.

I was on beta-blockers at the time, had problems with my heart rate, was being treated for bouts of tachycardia. So I was lucky.

But it’s left its mark. The fact that a man would prefer me unconscious. Remove any chance of fight or flight; remove anything I could use in my defence. Leave me a blank in my life where I was defiled, but I wasn’t present. Where I was defiled, but looked complicit. The fact that I was kind and friendly to a man who didn’t even think of me as human. Just prey, a target. Just a warm object he could pleasure himself with.

This is why I can’t close my eyes to the rape academies. Because now, there are thousands of men doing this to their wives, girlfriends, fiancées, daughters. Women who love them and trust them.

I was lucky. Twice. But luck is not a policy, and love is not a shield. These men need to be tracked down.

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If you’re a paid subscriber, your latest chapter of Why I Stole Your Life is here. Our last EFT session “Tapping into Worthy-Deservingness” is here. We had some great results on the day (which you can replicate if you tap along to the video) and two of the participants have reported reduced physical pain. You can vote on the subject of our May session on that video’s page.

Over to you

This is a tough subject, but one that needs to be talked about. As always, I welcome your comments unless you are a dickhead. Dickheads get blocked.

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Contents

Port Royal, Jamaica. 18 November 1720.

Prologue

BOOK 1. Broxholme, Devon. 1696-97.

1: The Reckon-Pence is Not Money

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Chapter 1

The Reckon-Pence is Not Money

We are the Tadpole Kings of Guzzle Down, Rat Masters of the Pantry, Grand Under-Tablers of the Blue Anchor, and we are preparing for murder.

My father is rolling a barrel of salt-beef towards the loading area. We are making ourselves small behind Mister Lampard’s whelk stall. Mister Lampard is on the dockside letting shouts rain on his head. The shouting man — a captain from his hat — is so red he could burst into flames. He is my father’s captain. Though his words are loud they mean nothing to us.

‘Dutch,’ you whisper.

‘How can you tell?’

‘Look at his shoes.’

There is only one shoe I can see, perched on the rail of the ship like a leather bird. A leather bird with a stockinged leg growing out of it. To me it looks no different than the shoes English captains wear, but because you are a year older than me and many beatings wiser, I trust your eye and begin to see a certain Dutchness in the way the toe curls.

Mister Lampard is pointing at my father and saying something not very polite. I ask you what it means. You know everything, is what I think about you then. That is why I trust you when you say we will have to kill the man who has finished rolling the salt-beef barrel along the dockside: has turned it onto its end.

‘Couldn’t Mister Lampard kill him for us?’ I ask.

His belly hangs over his belt like two loaves-worth of dough, but Mister Lampard used to wrestle for money.

‘It’s not for Mister Lampard to take revenge for Ma,’ you say. ‘If he wasn’t clever about it, he would be hanged.’

‘Won’t we be hanged?’ A boy our age was hanged at the Heavitree gallows for setting fire to a hayrick.

‘We will be clever about it,’ you say. ‘We will make it an accident.’

This is how we will erase the fear on our mother’s face. This is how we will cancel the sin of my making. I always knew I was born out of sin, because sometimes drink would make Ma say so. But I never knew how until yesterday, when she came back from buying the leftover catch tearful, with an empty basket. She said nothing to us, but everything to Mister Lampard, which is the same as to us when we have our ears to the boards. Forced in a dark stairwell, she said. Mister Lampard said there there, not asking for details, but she told him anyway, though what she said wasn’t much: the smell of rum and a knock to the head.

‘How do you know it’s him?’ Mister Lampard asked.

‘The tally tattoo on his arm,’ she said.

That inky five-bar gate we catch a flash of as he stands there, wiping his brow. A tally of ladies knocked on the head, maybe.

‘Will we kill him now?’ I ask.

A laugh huffs from your nostrils.

‘That wouldn’t be clever.’

We watch the man waddle back onto the boat. He has the long-time sailors’ walk, side to side, as if he is still at sea. Mister Lampard stomps back towards us. The Dutch captain is still shouting, throwing his words to land like spit on Mister Lampard’s head. Mister Lampard says,

‘Miserable old ______!’

Whatever the last word means, I am eager to learn it. He follows up with a string of oaths. Then our ears fill with gull-caw and boat-creak, waves slapping the wooden jetty, because Mister Lampard’s got all his anger out.

Later, he’s having supper with us. Whelks in gravy, and the bread Ma baked yesterday, which sticks to the top part of my mouth like a lie. They are talking about reckon-pence. Which is money you pay someone to atone for a sin. Ma is crying.

‘My languages ain’t good enough, Margret,’ says Mister Lampard. ‘I told the Cap-n he should pay for the littlun. I say to him, your man, your man, but he thinks I mean him. So I point at the man who - forgive me, Margret, we all know what he done - and I do a mime.’

It’s true. We saw the mime. Mister Lampard standing on the dockside wobbling his tarriwags like a dog on the butcher’s leg. A laugh burst out of me, I couldn’t stop it, and you might have told me off except one burst out of you too. But then, because Mister Lampard’s mime wasn’t silly enough to stop it being wrong that a sailor hit Ma over the head to make a baby, and we were supposed to be hiding, you made your face serious and nodded at me to be cross again, so I was. Now I check across the table to see if you’re remembering the mime. But you’re scraping a piece of bread around your plate, pushing the gravy into the middle, which means you’re listening very hard and pretending not to. Mister Lampard has Ma’s hand and is filling her ears with words.

‘So I says, keep the blunderbuss on the ship. So he don’t go off on some other woman. But the Cap-n says “All men must drink.” That’s all he says, Margret. “All men must drink.”’

Ma’s tears are falling silently into her lap. She’s looking at her hand in Mister Lampard’s. A mouse in a trap. Curled up soft, like it’s dying in Mister Lampard’s big bed of a hand, his fingers closed over hers.

‘I did what I could,’ he says.

When you’ve mopped up all the gravy, and shoved me your last bit of bread beneath the table, Ma shoos us into the rafters. It’s hot, as if all Ma’s fuss has nested up there like a fluster of pigeons. The mattress feels extra itchy under my shoulder, like some of the straw is poking through but when I complain you say it’s my thoughts that are itchy. You always know my thoughts, as if we really were the twins that strangers take us to be.

‘Does he look like me?’ I say. ‘Do I look like him?’

‘Maybe when he was a scrap he looked like you.’

If he was ever a scrap, he was a bruising scrap, the kind who fights out of his swaddling and punches his Ma on the nose.

‘Do you look like your Da?’ I say, and then I’m sorry, because he’s been a long time at sea and we’re not supposed to talk about him.

‘Ma says so,’ you say with armour in your voice, and I’m doubly sorry. It’s so long since he last went to sea that all we have of him is his name, Read, which all of us wear like a brand of belonging, even if he’s shaken us off, or the sea has shaken him out of his skin. I’ve wondered whether he’s looking down on us all from sailor heaven, which Mister Lampard says is blue skies, a fair wind, and an ocean of rum. But the new story is gnawing at me like a crab on bacon rind.

‘Maybe he didn’t come back because he didn’t believe Ma about the stairwell and the knock on the head,’ I say. ‘He’s at sea, you say,’ in a flat voice that means Don’t you even think anything else.

For a while after that you don’t speak and I wonder if you’ve fallen asleep, though your breathing is noiseless. A shanty starts up in the tavern across the street. I wonder if Mister Lampard is leading it because it’s Maid of Amsterdam but that would be unkind to Ma and anyway I hear him grunting downstairs, like he’s lifting something heavy. More likely it’s down to the Dutch ship being in harbour. When the song gets to the bit where the Great Big Dutchman Rammed My Bow you say,

‘We can’t do anything about my dad, but we can do something about yours.’ You don’t need my nodding in the dark, which is only to soothe the prickly thoughts my head, like a kind of rocking. You are talking more to yourself than anything when you say, ‘I have a plan.’

Only half of me wants to hear this plan of yours. The other half wants to hide under the blanket and muffle you out. But you’re my brother, so I ask you,

‘What?’

There’s a big pause like you didn’t have a plan at all and are thinking it up right on the spot. There’s moonlight coming through the gap in the eaves and I can just see the edge of your face, drawn in silver. You eyes close, and open.

‘We will kill him when he’s drunk.’

You wait as if I am meant to ask how but I am worried about the ‘we’. I have never killed so much as a beetle. I don’t know how not to be part of your ‘we’ because we do mostly everything together, so I ask,

‘What about the reckon-pence?’

You sit up in the dark, like your hair was pulled. You say death is reckon-pence enough. You say everyone who dies gets their reckoning, because of Judgement Day, and best my father gets in line for his sooner before he knocks any more women over the head and makes babies on them. Your plan has made you all twitchy and now you’re out of bed and pulling on your breeches. It looks like I might be excused from your ‘we’ because you’re not asking me to get dressed as well, but I’m still worried about the money. Ma told Mister Lampard to get money off him, because it’s hard to feed two littluns on what she makes from sewing. I’m thinking if she only feeds one it won’t be the one whose father smacked her on the mazzard.

‘But the money,’ I say.

‘She won’t be afraid to walk around Fishtown.’ Tying the cord around your waist. ‘And that’s worth a few bob.’

So it’s decided. You, or maybe we, will kill my father when he’s drunk, and leave God to sort out the reckon-pence.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Scouting. You get some sleep.’

I lie awake for a long time waiting for you to come back but all I hear is mouse-scritch. Outside, the tavern roars and then quiets, roars and then quiets, in waves like the sea itself. In the quiet I hear, high on St Mary’s hill, the murdered-woman shriek of a fox. Voices leave the tavern in clusters of holler and laughter. The fox is done with its horror and quiet gets thick as soup. A lonely song wobbles itself up the street.

Previous chapter ………………………… Next chapter

Contents Page

In this EFT tapping session, we began with the statement “I deserve to be comfortable and happy.” At the start of the hour, everyone who joined found that only half true. By the end, we were all at 85-90% true. Tap along, take your own start and finish readings, and see how you do. With a little more tapping for homework, can you make it 100%?

P.S. Everyone on the call already knew how to tap so there was no ‘tutorial’. If you’re a complete beginner, best to start with one of the previous video, either Tap into Wealth or Tapping Into Your Best Year Yet.

I’m taking suggestions for the subject of May’s tapping session, so please vote in the poll to let me know what you prefer. The pol…

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D[isaster]-Day

It’s October 2022. The headache is a tight metal band around my skull, tightened on a ratchet. A three-day headache that isn’t abating. My throat is raw as a grazed knee. The best place for me is bed, so that’s where I am when it comes: the message leading to the news that will, for the next few months, destroy me.

Have you seen this article in The Bookseller? It sounds like your book.

There’s a link. Before I’ve even clicked it, I feel sick.

There are no good ways for a friend to rip your heart out. But she had to tell me. She had been there from the book’s inception nearly a decade earlier. She was the reason it existed at all. Every time we’d met for a drink in the intervening years, she’d asked how it was going. Now, with 88 of its planned 92 chapters completed, she was letting me know that its life was hanging in the balance.

A Voice Out of Nowhere

January 2013. I’m off to York for my birthday weekend. We are pulling out of the garage when my phone goes. It’s my friend (and former mentee) Patience Agbabi. Her son has caught a bug, and suddenly, she can’t teach the Arvon workshop she’s due to deliver, starting Monday. In Yorkshire. Can I do it?

What a birthday present! It’s at Lumb Bank, an 18th-century former millhouse once owned by Ted Hughes. I met him as a teenage poet, and he recommended me for an Arvon course; I attended Totleigh Barton in Devon, aged 15, half as young as the next youngest person. To teach for Arvon at his former home is my dream. This is the year in which the universe will shower me with gifts (after some serious manifestation work); in a few months, I will be winning literary prizes and walking on literal red carpets.

“Stop the car!” I say. We are only 50 yards up the road. I run back into the house, pack my favourite writing exercises and extra clothes, grab a few copies of my books, and we’re off! On Sunday night, Paul drives me an hour across snowy hills and drops me at the tutors’ cottage.

It proves to be a memorable and dramatic week. One of the participants doesn’t take his meds, and some drama explodes that brings the rest of us close. But for the purpose of this story, only one thing matters: a book is born. The other tutor, Chris Wakling, and I take part in each other’s workshops. And in his character creation exercise (which I have since adopted), a voice starts talking to me. A young working-class girl from the 18th century.

Since I’m an author, this isn’t a case of upping my meds (I am only on thyroxine) or calling an exorcist. This 18th-century girl isn’t wafting through the 18th-century millhouse in a high-necked nightdress, prickling the hairs on our necks and bemoaning her fate. She’s a feisty, garrulous child, sitting on the steps of a small stone cottage in a Devon fishing village. She’s lippy and lively, and I like her. She tells me how she was born and raised, very much without love, and then we jump to her future, standing at the bow of a ship as it’s coming into port in the Caribbean Sea, with a thin boy half her size, called Gimlet. They’re chatting about how there’s a spot in the water that looks like it’s boiling.

‘Looks like stew,’ I say.

Closer. The boiling is cut through with critter fins. Sharks. The feast is not a stew, not a host of bits, but a single hunk, like a side of goat. Nothing furred, though. Blue-white tangled in black cloth. Flashing crimson when it turns.

‘I wouldn’t like that,’ Gimlet says.

‘Nobody would,’ I say, ‘but they are dead.’

‘I know.’

‘We’re all fish food in the end.’

And with that, the Female Pirate Book is born.

But I am writing Devotion at the time, and shortly after that, pick up my job at Goldsmiths, so it’s parked for the next two years.

Growing the Tale

When I pick it up, I’m vibrating with excitement. I’ve had prizes, but this one, surely, is going to be the book that kicks down the ‘bestseller’ door.

“Who doesn’t love a female pirate?” I say to Paul.

Memorably, he answers, “I’m sure you’ll find a way to make it uncommercial.”

But I have faith. This will be the book. Nevertheless, it takes time to get it off the ground. There are decisions to be made. Research to be done. A fictional female pirate or a real one? I read up on them all, across several centuries, and eventually follow my instincts to choose Mary Read. The only female pirate who didn’t get into piracy through a man (as daughter or girlfriend or wife). Her life is full and fascinating: she’s a footman, a soldier, and a tavernkeeper before she gets a sniff of a life at sea. She passes as male for almost all of her life: how on earth does that work, at close quarters, in bunkrooms and tents? How does she deal with periods, for example?

But she has her own concerns, and once I’ve refound her voice, an awful lot to say. She wants me to know how she became a pirate. Seems she’s determined to explain that it wasn’t her fault, hardly even her choice. It’s the outcome of circumstances, and a series of decisions, and she’s darn well going to educate me (and her imagined reader) on all of them. And this is how the book becomes the epic adventure of her life, from near-cradle to standing on the gallows, looking at a noose.

Writing has to happen around earning a living, and sometimes that knocks the book to bed for months at a time. The university year leads to months full of marking, and for three years I work a second job to make ends meet. Each time I stop, it takes two or three weeks to re-enter the world of the story and get back up to speed.

Frustrated with how long it’s taking I decide it’s time to stop writing like a poet: I must smash up my practice, really throw myself fully into ‘shitty first draft’. By this time, I know the book’s in three parts, and I write the whole of Part 2, her soldiering life, in this speedier way, thinking I’ll fix it in the edit. A conversation with my colleague Francis Spufford at the launch of his first novel, Golden Hill, makes me realise the storyline has gone unfixably wrong. All 40,000 words of Part 2 must be trashed. I start again, and more slowly. Like it or not, I’m a tortoise, not a hare.

Other things that slow me down: so much research. Military history books are the worst; they send me to sleep before I can read three pages. And all they tell me is the birds’ eye view of the generals, not the soldiers on the ground. (Should have read War and Peace! I am reading it now, thanks to .) Eventually, I find some first-hand accounts from the battles I’ve chosen she’ll fight in. (Documented details for this part of her life don’t exist.)

Then we get to sea, and OH the stuff I have to learn! And then how to ‘wear it lightly’ this research. And still there is so much story. She has so much to say.

And then 2020 happens, and a week before lockdown, I catch Covid. No tests then, but I’m very, very ill. I don’t know why I’m not getting better, several weeks in, why I have to sit down and take a break after walking about two hundred yards. The brain fog and fatigue. Long Covid is my companion for the rest of the year. The three or four hours of screen time I can manage per day is spent teaching remotely, and converting my in-person university modules to work online. I don’t write the book for almost a year.

In the second half of 2022, there is no more research. Every element of the story is in place, and finally, we are accelerating towards the finish line. In October, I’m four chapters from the end when I catch Covid again. And then my phone goes ping.

The Other Book

When I click the link, everything I’d dreamed for my book collapses into dust. Bloomsbury has bought, in a six-figure deal, a novel about the pirate Mary Read. Everything they say about it sounds like mine. Compelling. Poetic.

The sound that comes out is a howl. The sheer horror propels me out of bed, but I don’t get far, I collapse to my knees. Paul comes in to find out what’s happened and at first, I can’t even find words. I know what this means. I’m destroyed.

I email my agent with the terrible news and ask her opinion. She agrees it’s a disaster. The only chance we have, she says, is to try to beat the other book to publication. Which has already been announced for 18 months. With trad publishing turnarounds, we have to be swift.

“How quickly can you finish it?” she asks.

“If I push really hard, put all else aside, four weeks. But the second half will be in a first draft state, I’ll need time to edit.”

“Get it to me in four weeks,” she says, “sooner if you can.”

So with my head still pounding and my fever still high, I go down to my basement study and begin. And when I’m not writing, I’ll be honest, I’m mostly weeping. I’m furious with myself for taking so long. I want to tear myself to pieces. I’m shocked at how deeply it throws me back into old ways of feeling, twenty years before, when I hated myself.

Paul says, “Perhaps this has happened because it’s more important that you do this personal growth work than that the book gets published”, and it’s really not the time.

In four weeks, I write THE END and send it to my agent.

“It’s longer than you said,” she says.

I know. This is one of the reasons it’s taken as long as it has. Big characters. Big story. But I’ve armed myself with long book stats, all the great books it’s shorter than.

“The market’s changed,” she says. “Per page printing costs are much higher since Brexit.” As if the other book wasn’t problem enough, we have an issue with size.

I tell her, “Please try.”

My previous publisher holds an ‘option’, so they get first refusal.

“Do tell Juliet that I know the second half needs work,” I said. “Let her know I know it’s a first draft, and I’m working on the edit.”

Four weeks later, just before Christmas, a No.

“Did you tell her that I know the second half needs work?”

She admits she didn’t. “I didn’t want to talk it down.”

I feel like screaming. Not just with her, but with the whole situation. And most of all, at myself for being the slowest, stupidest writer in Christendom. Who knew I had balanced so much of my self-regard on the fate of this book? Not me.

“Why Don’t You Self-Publish?”

By April, my agent had gathered a whole bunch of ‘No’s. It was now 12 months until the other book’s publication, and I was desperate to beat it to the punch. So desperate that, at my agent’s suggestion, I decided to do what I’d already publicly (and notoriously, in The Guardian) said I wouldn’t do: self-publish.

Not because there’s anything wrong with doing that (I had published non-fiction when I wrote that piece), but because it’s hard for literary fiction to find readers that way, and what I want is readers. Unless you’re a marketing genius (and you love that kind of thing) or you really don’t care how many copies you sell, self-publishing is the hardest route of all.

Part 3 still wasn’t sufficiently revised, but Part 1 was good to go, so I decided this: split it into three books. Publish them six months apart, and the third should coincide (just about) with The Other Book.

Well, long story short, what a shit show. Of course it was. Hadn’t I predicted this wasn’t for me? Oh boy, how it wasn’t. This part deserves a whole piece of its own, so for now, I will skip to the end. The few people who read Nothing Becoming really loved it, but (even though I gave it an extra chapter to end it) it very clearly wasn’t complete. By the end, she’s about to join the army, and past the prologue, there’s barely a sniff of the sea. A great deal of effort, and a lot of borrowed money later, I’d achieved nothing but sufficient stress to make me ill.

My Champion Appears

At someone else’s book launch, an agent who had been sort of ‘courting me’ for the previous six months gives me the hard truth I need to hear.

There’s no way I can ‘beat’ the other book.

I sign with him in September 2023. His advice? Unpublish Nothing Becoming, “drop it in a memory hole,” and put the epic adventure back together. I meet him in the British Library to hand over, in a carrier bag, the printed-out rest of the book so he can make notes on it (he’s very old-school). At one point while reading, he sends me this email:

I am well on now and loving every page I’m reading and as I read (well into Mary’s life at sea now), the more I am awestruck with admiration for the level of your achievement. It’s monumental and brilliant, and more importantly works on a totally human level that speaks to the reader person to person.

The biggest marvel of the book, apart from its size and scope, is its voice--the voice of Mary--and the conversation it sets up with the reader all along the way, bringing in so much observation and commentary that allows us recognise our world, our values, our potentials and failures in hers.

I am concluding the novel is a Booker shortlist--even Booker-winning--level work of (hesitates to use the word, for seldom is it deployed) genius. It combines research with a level of imaginative power and authority that I find breathtaking as I read.

At last, the book has a champion.

The Market

Once I get to my quieter term, in January 2024, I begin a mammoth edit. By July, it is still very long, but restructured and cleaner. After a two-month read, my agent bounces it back with a few more changes, which are done by the end of the year.

In 2025, he starts making quiet enquiries. He’s well-connected in the business, but sadly, that isn’t enough. What do we learn? Well, the Other Book is no longer perceived as a problem, but others exist.

• The market is risk-averse.

• The book is very big, and I am not.

• I do not have a million followers on Instagram or TikTok.

• I do not (yet) have 30,000 Substack subscribers

• Thin books are in.

• Japanese and Korean translations are in.

• Young authors are in.

We have had to conclude this is not yet our time. This book may one day find itself between physical covers, but that will only happen if I can grow an audience sufficient to make that economically viable. So this is, perhaps, where you (and any reader friends you have) might come in.

As announced last week, I am serialising the novel, Dickens-style, on this Substack, every Tuesday. Paid subscribers are a week ahead and should have received this: free subscribers will get the first chapter in their inboxes next week. The whole book will be accessible here.

That feisty young girl who materialised at Ted Hughes’ old house 13 years ago, sitting on her cottage steps, has waited long enough to be heard. She has a great deal to say. This wild adventure is not yet at the end, and both of us, me and her, are putting our faith in you helping us to some kind of happy ending.

Below the paywall for paid subscribers: a compact extra. How I manifested this unpleasant experience (yes, I own it) and how you can avoid doing the same!

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Prologue

Life Shows Up to Say Goodbye

The walk to the gallows is a feast of sensation. Nothing lets you know you’re alive like Death at your shoulder. Prodded up some badly-carpented steps, your wrists bound in sisal, your ankles hobbled with iron cuffs chained together, to a platform where your extinction twirls in the breeze in a loop ahead of you. On the fifth step, the protruding slant of a nailhead knocked in by some fellow not caring too much about the finish. Not caring too much about who’d be going up these steps and not coming down again. That slant nail groans through the grain of a tree chopped down and planked to bear your weight, its wood striped with every year it grew. A tree once slender as a finger. Its whole future contained in a seed you could put in your mouth and swallow.

Life shows up to say goodbye. Last taste! says the brain, that roguish companion who steered you into so many holes. Drink it in! says the old thinker. Meaning eyes and ears and nose and every hair on your body but what you have the most thirst for is air. You suck it deep into your lungs and despite the sun already fierce on your skin, the air comes in cool because the wind is running in strong from the sea. If your eyes are thirsty, nature rises up to satisfy them, willing as that sweet wench at the Fortune. Colours as vivid as they’ve ever been, any day of your life. Last moments! they shout. Nature puts on a show for those about to fertilise it, whether hung in cages over the water or dug into the ground. Nature gives thanks with yellows so yellow they punch you in the throat. Paragreets screeching laughter in the trees, green as limes. Hibiscus flowers red as a whore’s dress. The sky so blue and wide and empty it makes you want to weep for your mother, even if she never much loved you and often wished you unborn. The whole crowd gathered to watch you die ripples like a field of wheat. Behind them, bleached and clustering huts, and behind the huts, the sea shushing you with its ancient song. That old keeper of your history, laying itself over the beach again and again saying miss me, miss me.

The Governor comes out of the low white building where he has been putting on his braids and fakery — the costume required to kill with authority and without penalty.

‘Desperate men all!’ says a woman in the crowd. From what I saw in the wagon from Spanish Town, there’s little in anyone’s face to confirm her pronouncement. Featherstone looked as peaceable as if he were about to lay His Bonyness down to sleep for the night. Davies and Howl, who count laughter their chief rebellion, were grinning like children about to be caned. Absent in thought, Bonny’s head nodded with the ruts of the road like every bump was a yes. Squire Corner held a face as smooth as a lake, his thoughts invisible under the surface.

I could not look at Rackham.

Then we were bundled out and two uniformed men, who besides their uniforms seemed more roguish than any of us, prodded us into an order, wishing the least of us hanged first and the ones deemed the rascaliest rascals last, so that we might die from left to right, as though we are a sentence building to an exclamation mark. So much do they love hierarchy that they must write us into it even at death. So Davies and Howl were prodded up first to be hanged on the left as the crowd sees it, and then Bonny and myself as the fiercest fighters, and then Squire Corner, because he is Quartermaster, and His Bonyness, Featherstone, as Sailing Master, and finally Rackham, the captain who never set himself above any of us.

Gallows Point is a fine place to die, with the Fort that once surrounded it dropped into the sea by a quake many moons ago. Why hang men here, circled in the arms of the sea, and nature pushing up wild through the brick and stone? To show us what we are losing. To remind us what we will decorate when our bodies are caged and displayed, on the approach to Jamaica, until we are skeletons. Which in this rich rotting clime will not be long. The smallest injury will fester hard, as anyone knows.

Every inch of this life is a wonder. Not only the tigerish butterflies broader than your palm, or the flame-feathered birds, but the sand flies that seemingly pop in and out of existence and the small child emptying their bowels by the powder store. Goodness yes, human beings, with all their idiocy and brilliance, constructors and destroyers of the world, masters of engineering and victims of feeling. What perspective I am granted now, as I wait for my hanging. The world made suddenly vivid and jewel-like. Here is the treasure, in our hands all along, that never needed to be raided or robbed.

Is this why I change my mind?

Brother, I swear, I was ready to die. Was determined to go with my crew.

But the body has no desire to be quitted. Filled to overflowing with something whose word I hardly dare say, a word often used narrowly and often abused, so universally longed for, so seemingly hard to come upon, but right at my end it charges fiercely through my body: love. Unending and boundless love. For everything. For everyone. Even that ridiculous Governor climbing up to his separate podium to address the crowd. Love of this life, that is what changes me, riffling through my body. Every pipe and tube vigorous with fluids, wanting me to run, or wanting to run out of me. Every hair on my skin raised up like an army of soldiers stood to attention. There are words that would save my neck. And now it is everything I can do to hold on to them.

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Contents Page

How to evolve humanity? Person by person. Join 6,500 subscribers to clarify your thinking, regulate your emotions and strengthen hope as we manifest a better reality.

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Making generalisations is problematic. Is my husband of 25 years broken? Only in his mitochondria. Is my youngest son broken? No, he had a rough few years, but now he’s happily partnered and is googling birth plans and how to care for newborns. Are my male readers and supporters broken? Hell no. They are reading words written by a woman, which instantly puts them in a heroic minority.1

But my eldest son, and the #NotAllMen men, who feel called out when women complain about the behaviour of far too many of their sex and the men who jump into my comments to call me a bitch who is doing more harm than good? Yes, the patriarchy has fucked them all over, in numerous different ways.

The rule of good writing means a headline can’t say ‘Some men are broken.’ That doesn’t trigger male outrage, but it triggers ‘So what?’ Yes, so what? Some women are broken, too. Some ATMs are broken. Some dishwashers are broken. If something exists in the world, you can bet a percentage of examples of that thing will be, in some sense or other, broken. We lose sight of the problem. Which is this: there are an increasing number of men who think women are dishwashers, and a decreasing number of women who think men are ATMs.2

Enough men are broken in dangerous ways — dangerous to women, children, the planet, and yes, other men — for me to call this piece ‘Men are broken.’ On the whole, it is men rather than women who are panicking about their inability to find sexual partners. Men, rather than women, are ill-equipped for a reality where women don’t need them to live good lives. As Lyle W Fass so beautifully puts it

men have been running things forever and the returns are in. This is the resume. War, hierarchy, domination, environmental ruin, financial predation, loneliness, fascism, pornographic ego, and a giant digital bunker for men who cannot process that women are no longer structurally obligated to choose them.

Feminism has led to women’s independence and self-sufficiency, and rather than adapt to the new landscape, a solid percentage of men want to squeeze the genie (women’s freedom) back into the bottle.

What percentage is hard to judge. What do we measure? 50 per cent of British young men believe that feminism “has gone too far and makes it harder for men to succeed.” Globally, men under 30 are twice as likely as their grandads to think wives should obey their husbands. And the result of this attitudinal regression? Yep, the male loneliness epidemic. Too many men think they should be able to dominate women, and women are less and less interested in being dominated.

Because no, we are not ‘naturally submissive.’ And we’re clued up now: we know that deferring to men leads to our abuse. We are done with being treated as subordinate creatures who exist for men’s pleasure. And the men who don’t adapt to this landscape, men who don’t evolve, are going to have to say goodbye to their sex lives and bloodlines.

From frontline reports, dating these days is a nightmare. In The Real Reason Dating is So Hard Right Now (That No One is Naming), points out dating behaviour reflects the realities of earlier centuries rather than this one: men are behaving like they don’t need committed relationships, which on all measurable outcomes, benefit them excessively, and women continue to desire them, despite the fact that single women are the happiest, healthiest and wealthiest demographic. This is understandable when one is seeking love, companionship, and perhaps someone to raise children with, but statistics show this is an extremely risky business with far too many poor outcomes for the women involved.

The solution Celeste proposes is equality. And yes, speaking from within an equal partnership, happiness is the outcome for both parties. We each do what we like and are good at. He cooks, does the shopping and laundry. I bring in and manage the money, do gardening and DIY. We split the housework, and when someone’s load increases or someone gets ill, the other steps up. When the kids were young, we shared most duties, but he was our daughter’s main carer.

A genuinely loving relationship is based on choice, rather than dependence. But it requires embracing risk. As Celeste Davis points out,

Relationships based on choice rather than need [are] way scarier. Our partner could leave at any time. There are no guarantees. We’ve got to behave in a way where our partner keep choosing to stay with us day after day.

It’s so much more secure to set things up so that our partner is dependent on us.

And yet, that’s not love. That’s a cage.

Embracing the risk that your partner can choose not to be with you takes a level of emotional maturity that far too many people appear not to possess, and particularly those men hamstrung by distorted ideas of masculinity that require that they dominate partners they view as subordinate. In that quote now doing the rounds on the internet, “Marriage ensures even the poorest man gets a free slave.”

So how to move society as a whole towards equality? How to make equality the norm, thus making everybody happier? Not through women writing about it, I suspect. The men who read feminist writing and agree with it aren’t the people we need to reach, and the people we need to reach the most don’t listen to, or read, the words of women.

In It’s Not Only The Violence: Women are Enraged by Men’s Cultivated Ignorance writes of the reluctance of (80%) of men to read women’s words.

In this 2023 study and numerous other measures over the years, men overwhelmingly read only books by other men, and if they do read women’s work, prefer them dead.

Dead women who authored ‘classics’ are safe. They’re never going to turn around and tell you to pull your socks up (or indeed, pick them up off the floor, and learn to use the washing machine).

So the men have to do this thing. Embrace equality, and write about it, and talk about it, with/to other men. Only men are going to solve the problem that men created.

I’m not saying it’s easy. A lot of self-awareness is required. This attempt, for example, is well-meaning but missing the mark. In ‘A Mile in Her Shoes,’ a straight man stuck in drag (for laughs) when the parade is over, the men around him are drunk and his friend (with the key to the apartment) is missing, finds out what the male gaze (and evading male horniness) feels like, for a night. But the way he talks about women stops short of getting it. Here’s a scene from his youth, where he’s one of a drunk group of guys, late at night, approaching an elevator:

Inside was a lone woman. She wore a tight blue dress with heels, probably coming home from her own version of a terrible frat party. She saw us approaching, several intoxicated men, and so she leaned forward and started pressing the door close button.

This was taken as a challenge.

One of us ran towards the elevator, trying to catch it before it closed. She saw him coming and desperately pounded the button, forgetting all pretense. But my friend won the race, managing to place his hand through the sensor and prevent it from closing.

“What the fuck?!” He asked her with righteous indignation. She didn’t say anything. Instead, she slid sideways past him and hurried to the stairwell.

“Nice try!” he shouted at her as she fled.

After being sexually assaulted (which he calls being ‘sexually harassed’, a minimising mis-naming), he feels experienced enough to reframe it:

I thought back to that moment in the elevator. When that woman repeatedly pressed the door close button. At the time, I thought she was just being a rude bitch.

But now I had lived her perspective. She saw several grown men approaching her, all of us seemed just as big compared to her as this guy was to me. She knew that, most likely, we had nothing but good intentions. But fear is instinctual, and it manifests of its own accord. She decided that there was no fucking way she was going to be stuck in an elevator with several intoxicated grown men, so she tried to shut the door on us. When that didn’t work, she ran away.

It’s nice that he no longer thinks she’s “a rude bitch”, but he still doesn’t get it. Imagine thinking, “She knew that, most likely, we had nothing but good intentions”! No, she didn’t know that. We never know that. A bunch of drunk men want to pile into a lift with a solo woman? The chances of being raped or sexually assaulted are high, and sexual harassment is pretty much a certainty.3 It’s clear from everything else in this essay that, despite having a small taste of what it’s like to have to deal with horny men, the author is a long way from seeing us as human.

So who is doing it well? The previously tagged , whose full awakening as a feminist ally is described in The Fraternity of Contempt. His article Bring Me the Matriarchy is worth reading too:

Because women did not need to “catch up” to men in some grand civilizational race. They were always there. They just had to get their ankles out of the trap. And now that they have, even partially, the backlash is everywhere, in abortion politics, in online culture, in dating, in education, in the ecstatic cruelty of male resentment turned into content. Men are furious because women have become harder to control.

So yes, women are the most marginalized group in history. They are also, increasingly, the clearest measure of whether a society deserves to call itself civilized. Show me how a culture treats women and I will tell you what it is. Show me its laws, its jokes, its religious codes, its marriage customs, its educational gaps, its rape statistics, its childcare policies, its men, and I can tell you whether it is serious or sick.

There is also A.R.Moxon, who garnishes his essay for men, ‘Fix Your Hearts or Die’, with the subtitle ‘It's an invitation, not a threat. The path to liberation for lonely men is feminism.’ It’s the same solution to relationship misery proposed by Celeste Davis: equality brings both men and women love, support, and feeling seen. His framing of patriarchy/feminism is as clear as it gets.

The system that holds that women are property of men is called patriarchy.

The system that holds that women are human beings is called feminism.

The path to a better version of humanity than the one we’re currently living with is littered with potholes and twists. Each of us can only do what we can.

Women can’t reach the men who don’t think of them as human, but men can. Male writers can’t reach the men who don’t read, but podcasters can. Though those who speak to the pain of lonely men and don’t blame women for it are fairly thin on the ground (and I’m open to recommendations). Your male friends can be challenged to be less sexist wherever they show up: social media, football, the pub. Sure, we women can challenge them too, but when they only really care what men think, then it’s men who must take the lead. A lot of us women are frankly sick of being ignored and mischaracterised.

Feminism truly is the solution to a whole raft of problems humanity is facing: the anger, depression and loneliness of both men and women, the unacceptable rates of domestic abuse and sexual violence, and all the anxiety, trauma, and generational damage that engenders. But only men are really in a position to bring it home. We women will keep doing what we can, and all the non-binary and gender fluid folk will, I hope, pull on whatever ropes they can, but it is men who have the power to make other men listen. I really hope more of you fellas can be persuaded to use it.

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Exciting Announcement :-)

I spent EIGHT years researching and writing the novel my agent says I was born to write — and calls ‘Booker-worthy’. But in the eight years it took to create, the publishing world shrank away from historical epics. Paper costs are high, margins are squeezed, and fat novels now require superstar status, not mid-range platforms.

Long-time subscribers will know what a ridiculously bumpy road I’ve travelled with this in the three years since: I’ll write it up next week in full. But in the meantime, I will tell you the upshot. After a recent London Book Fair Substack event I attended, which featured novels picked up from this platform, a Substack piece in The Bookseller and discussions with my agent, I’ve decided to publish it here, on Substack.4

Why I Stole Your Life tells the story of real-life footman, soldier, and (eventually) pirate Mary Read. It’s coming, a chapter a week, every Tuesday, in the old Dickens mode. It will take just under two years for the whole tale to unfold, so I hope you have patience. I’ve now had more than a decade to develop mine.

Paid subscribers will get every chapter a week in advance, starting this coming Tuesday, 14th April. Free subscribers will get the first chapter on 21st April.

I’m really excited to share this epic adventure with you. It’s going to be a huge amount of fun getting real-time responses and discussions as we experience it together. Let’s consider the comments section as some kind of lively Dickensian coffee-house!

Make Money Good Again!

In the How to Evolve yourself corner, we looked last month at the need for good-hearted people to improve their income, and our practical session ‘Tap Into Wealth’ brought some great results. The recording is available on this link for paid subscribers, and all previous recordings can be found at this tab on the How To Evolve website.

This month, we are deepening our money work by upgrading our ‘worthy-deservingness’ quotient. Our live session is next Friday, 17th April, at 7pm BST. Paid subscribers can register to attend here: ‘I Deserve to be Comfortable and Happy’. If you say these words out loud and they don’t ring 100% true, consider coming along. Because we all, I promise you, deserve to be comfortable and happy. And you’ll only need to make the tiniest vibrational shift to manifest the money to pay for it!

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Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. Hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.

— Rebecca Solnit.

For days, I’ve been drafting something about the manosphere, and now the sun’s out. Sparrows are nesting in the spikey, out-of-control plant we call Diego. The trees are unfurling leaves so luminously green you could be tripping. Suddenly, it’s light at 7 pm, thanks to the clock trick. Petunias in my greenhouse are flowering a month too early. I leave the house to buy a gift without needing a coat. Sunshine cracks through the transom window above the front door at the angle it only achieves in the first weeks of spring. The angle that means I’ve made it, once more, through the dark. And I feel too peaceful to want to lock horns with the world. So I’ll finish that piece next week.

Free of term-time structures since I lost my university teaching job, I’m surprised to find, as I write this, that tomorrow’s Good Friday. Easter is a beautiful time for me. For many, I suspect, especially those of us who don’t thrive in the darkness. Spring springs upon its annual reminder that death cycles through to rebirth. The Christian calendar mirrors the season: suffering ends, and miraculous good emerges from what looked hopeless.

Spring cheers me most of all as a herald of summer. Summer is my season. In my memoir MS, I’ve been writing this week about my Californian childhood, where it was, to my recollection, summer all year. Looking up the house I used to live in, and the neighbouring houses where my friends lived, including an aspirational real-estate listing which, when I was seven, was simply ‘Suzy’s house’. The only online photo of my favourite home is the deck, symbolic of all-year-round outdoor eating: my dream. California is a place whose weather suited me deeply. The culture, not so much, or I might have chosen to live there, before I renounced my citizenship. But culturally, I’m a Brit through and through: Monty Python, Sunday roasts, Jarvis Cocker, free healthcare, Eric Morecambe, 16th-century pubs, The Globe, and Philomena Cunk. And the whole of British culture — including our humour — seems to hinge on the presence of ridiculous, unpredictable weather.

Temperamentally, though, I’m not happy with this country’s meteorological offerings. I’m a spring/summer lover and can’t get past thinking rain, sleet, and gales as ‘bad’. Though my husband has tried, for 25 years, to school me otherwise: not ‘bad weather’, wrong clothes. Rain is ‘refreshing’. Sub-zero days make you ‘glad to get in’ (yeah, how about just stay in). Windy days are ‘exciting’ and ‘bracing’ apparently, and not just ‘bashing up my plants’ or ‘trying to rip the roof off the porch.’ Last week, the wind finally succeeded in its long-term aims. The roof lantern over the porch is a mess, screwed and taped back together many times this last decade, but last week, we found it open to the sky. Our temporary fix isn’t going to survive another winter, or even another spring gale. The whole structure is unsafe, and we’ll just have to swallow (and borrow) the costs of replacement. This might have brought me down even more than the roof.

But Spring, effortlessly, returns me hope. And the deeper metaphor, too. The cycle of seasons repeatedly shows us that darkness and turbulence always resolve into light. A period of storms and freezing darkness is part of the natural process: necessary for broken things to die, and fresh things to seed. Through Spring, I’m reminded of this fundamental: destruction then renewal is how Nature cleans the slate, allows us to start ‘afresh, afresh, afresh’. This is as true of nature as it is of societies and of individual lives. Personal breakdowns, if they do not sink us, lead to breakthroughs. Post-war Britain brought in the deep good of the Welfare State.

Human progress is more of an upward spiral than a circle, and though we see the patterns of the 1930s all around us, it’s possible, possible, that we, as a whole (with many individuals excepted) are just a little wiser; wise enough to step back from the brink of wholesale carnage.

“Hope is an axe you break down doors with.”

Rebecca Solnit wrote these words about climate change, but they apply across the board. What matters, whether we are looking at society’s mess or at our individual lives, is breaking through despair. Hope in the face of uncomfortable facts is a radical, revolutionary act. It frees us to live, and breathe, and spark into joy.

And what was dormant bursts back to life.

Or if you prefer, you can

Thank you for being here. Over to you:

1. Do you have feelings about WEATHER?

2. Favourite season (and why)?

3. What’s making you most hopeful right now?

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We lie face down on the massage table. My body and I. My body, which is hurting all the time now. A permanent yoke across the shoulders from the burden of trying to survive as a creative person in a world that (largely) doesn’t give a fuck about art.

It’s not the world’s fault. It’s me. The way I sit, despite an expensive back-friendly chair. The way I slip into hyperfocus, failing to notice my 30-minute timer ding me into a movement break, and three hours later, emerging from a river of words into a sea of pain. And consequences. Sometimes a two-day headache. Sometimes cervicogenic (neck-created) vertigo. No writing happens then. This is nature’s corrective move when you’re living out of balance.

So I’m trying to make peace with my body. And in the middle of what should be a working afternoon, my body and I lie down for a massage. Directly below the hole where the face goes: brass singing bowl.

“Is that a bowl for catching the tears?” I joke.

Marta’s softly accented voice as she pulls a warm towel across my shoulders:

“Oh darling,” she says. “If you want.”

And immediately, I want.

I don’t cry, though. The very thought is humiliating. I’m the strong one. Capable. I do everything myself, tile bathrooms, build furniture, and process trauma. DIY to the core. I learned years ago that it’s not safe to lean on other people: when you’re carrying big stuff, most folk can’t take it. They collapse under the weight or say things that make it worse, then step away, and you’re sobbing in a heap on the floor, doubly abandoned. It’s nearly nineteen years since I learned the powerful process that gave me emotional self-regulation. Since then, with relief, I offload my shit alone.

But my body is telling a story of its own. My body is building pain like a piece of art. Starting in the spine and radiating outwards like briars clambering up a crucifix.

Enough to bring me here, to the massage table, where Marta asks me to take deep breaths and release them. Where Marta, sensing my armour, says,

“This is your time to receive.”

Now that damn singing bowl is going to catch some tears.

Receive, you say. Ah, that thing that I am famously bad at. Ask, and it is given? Not in that childhood home. So I learned not to ask. Internalised that old corner shop sign, “Please don’t ask for credit as a refusal often offends.” I wasn’t offended by my mother’s refusals, but wounded. Feeling you have no value is not something you want reinforced. So you learn not to ask.

Earlier this year, my son and his pregnant partner were driving across France in sub-zero temperatures. They were planning to sleep overnight (without heat) in their tiny van. Their blankets were wet. Their budget is tight. So while they made miles, I researched, then paid for (out of my seemingly bottomless debt) an overnight stay en route. My son’s 31.

Because I’ll never leave offspring of mine the way mum left me, at 16, half that age, stranded in Yorkshire on New Year’s Day, having sprained my ankle on a 40-mile hike, the ancient support car kaput. Lots of snow and ice, six foot snowdrifts. My boyfriend and I pooled what money we had for hot food in the pub and slept in the broken-down car. The car needed a part and would not be repaired for days. We were down to pennies. From a phone box, shivering, hoping that just this once she’d come through, I rang my Mum and told her our dire situation. Steeling myself against the no, I asked if she’d drive the three hundred miles to get us. And of course, the No came. “Have fun getting back,” she said. “I’m sure it will be an adventure.” To her 16-year-old daughter. I can’t imagine doing the same.

So asking has long been tough, but there’s no asking here. I didn’t ask for a massage; I booked one, paid for it; this isn’t about a fear of refusal. So what about “This is your time to receive” makes me cry?

Because long, long ago, I found out I had shut that off too. In that first bad marriage, there was no receiving. I gave, and I gave, to my husband and children, until I had nothing left for myself. Emptied and squeezed until the inside collapses, and nothing could fill it. When I first started healing myself, and visualised what was inside, what was under my skin, it was tar. Thick black tar, with no space for light or air. No space to receive.

Did this explain the sex? My first thought when Marta said, “This is your time to receive,” was Oh, the sex. When my brand new second husband and I returned from our tantric sex retreat in Costa Rica, we hit an issue of which I’d previously been unaware because frankly, no man had really gone there for any length of time. Yep, you know what I’m saying. Sure, they’d “gone there.” But not for long. I’d never let them.

What Tantric sex teaches is balance, yin and yang. You and your lover are equals: in a heterosexual relationship, god and goddess. Your pleasure and his are equally framed. Lovers switch giving and receiving; this is how you extend pleasure over hours, into days, reaching states that are more than borderline spiritual: the sense of yourself as a physical being can melt away. And in a heterosexual couple, since the man must delay any one-and-done completion, the woman may need to get very comfortable with receiving.

But messed-up situations from my past made receiving pretty hard. That focus on me: no thanks. I felt under the spotlight. Manipulated, even. Surrender to pleasure felt dangerous, scarily vulnerable; no, I would not lose control. In the bedroom, give, give, give had long been my answer. I knew what I was doing; how to change a man’s mind, divert his intentions and put myself back in the driving seat.

Fun fact: a fellow writer I had a wild weekend with, years ago, wanted to repeat the experience, and when I said no, he offered me £500 to repeat the blowjob. My friend, it was a free service only, and not for douchebags. When I pointed out that I wasn’t a prostitute, he asked me if I could teach my technique to his girlfriend. Can you even imagine how that would have gone?

Douches aside, I used these skills for self-protection. Someone starts going down? You know what to grab, and exactly what to do to switch tracks. Marked safe from intimacy ✅.

So, post Costa Rica, this was a problem to tackle.

Eventually, by playing certain tricks on myself, adopting certain mental narratives, I learned to receive. But never me as me. Only me in certain make-believe roles. Lady Chatterley with Mellors. Never Ros. Ros doesn’t receive. Ros keeps her armour on.

This has a wider resonance. The evidence from my life is that for long stretches at a time, I pinch myself off from receiving. Yes, I’ve received awards, recognition and then, oop! comes the attention, the uncomfortable focus on me. And maybe there’s part of me that, thanks to my childhood, doesn’t feel deserving. This is something I’m actively working to change.

After the massage, I asked Marta what oil she used. She said peppermint and lavender, standard relaxation. What the smell had reminded me of was eucalyptus, the trees that populated the hills above Berkeley where I lived when I was seven. The eucalyptus-scented hot road I’d walk up from where I was dropped by the yellow school bus to the house with my mum sunbathing on the balcony over the garage. The poodle called Prince, the grand piano in the cool marble hall and jewel-coloured hummingbirds haunting the porch. This thought: the last time I was happy.

Which was shocking, unexpected, not true. But I also get it. That was the last time I was happy through and through. At seven, I was still fully blended with my inner being, that ineffable joy that all of us are born with. “Before life got complicated,” I said to Marta. Which put me on the edge of tears again. “Heavenly, seasonless California,” as I wrote in the sequence ‘Lafayette Super 8’ two decades ago.

All these things. My body’s got so much to say to me right now. And I get it, body, I do. I’ve lived a lot in my head, ignoring your wisdom. But you’re right, for sure. Getting re-blended with my joyful inner being is long overdue.

This is my time to receive.

Want to help me receive without initiating terrifying acts of intimacy? Here’s how.

❤️ Light the heart — it costs nothing and means more than you’d think.

✌️ If ‘Lafayette Super 8’ caught your attention, it lives in How Things Are on Thursday — grab a copy or leave a review.

☕️ If you’re feeling inclined, you can buy me a coffee.

And if you want more of this, plus want me to keep writing in the face of absolutely ridiculous obstacles:

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Paid subscribers are keeping me fed and housed right now, and I’m grateful.

Registration is also open for our April 17th session: “I Deserve to Be Comfortable and Happy.” Say that out loud. If it doesn’t feel true — come.

Now, over to you

1. Do you struggle to receive?

2. Have you ever had a breakthrough on a massage table?

3. Do you remember the last time you were fully blended with joy as a child?

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Say it out loud. How true is that statement for you?

Rate on a percentage scale from 0% (not true at all) to 100% (completely true). Don’t think too much about the number. Accept the first number that arises.

If it’s lower than 90%, your life is probably reflecting that.

In April’s live session, we’ll use EFT tapping as a group to increase your worthy-deservingness quotient in a way that sticks and has real-life results. We’ll focus particularly on finances, which is a problem for many good-hearted people.

• Date: Friday 17th April

• Time: 7pm BST

• Where: Zoom

Suitable for all, whether or not you’ve tried EFT tapping before. You can watch recordings of previous sessions here.

Pre-registration is essential, so register for your place now and stick it in your calendar!

Register for Live Session

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At the beginning of the year, when I asked what I could give you more of, the most popular option was poetry deep dives. Whether as writers or readers, poetry enriches our lives in numerous ways, and the better we understand its inner workings, the more pleasure it brings.

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of being the opening keynote speaker for the Philip Larkin Society’s 2026 conference, which gave me an opportunity to drill into my favourite Larkin poem, ‘Aubade’. This seems the perfect time to deliver your first poetry deep dive, pulled from that talk.

I hoped to record myself speaking the poem before leaving for Hull, but ran out of time. I will add a recording here next week when I return, but for now, here’s the poem. I suggest you read it first and then dive right in.

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Thank you to everyone who attended this session and contributed so brilliantly to the energy. We had a fantastically productive hour with loads of great results across the board.

If you tap along with the recording, you will get results! And I look forward to hearing from you about how the shift in your attitude to money manifests in changes to finances in the days to come.

If you liked this, let me know by lighting up the heart! ❤️

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To celebrate International Women’s Day (and give myself a week off so I can focus on writing the next book), here’s some recycled feminist sass! I’m reposting this piece from 2 years ago, just after I came to Substack, when I had only 775 subscribers. There are now over 6,000 of you, so I’m guessing some of you didn’t see it. Enjoy!

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Listen, no one asks to be born a girl. It just happens. You can like it or lump it, as my mum used to say. She thought it was a good thing where I was concerned because she was left labouring in a hospital corridor for refusing to sign a form agreeing to my circumcision. She thought genital mutilation of newborn babies was a bad thing, go figure. But she refused to consent to having my penis snipped, and despite her intransigence on the paperwork, I arrived just as the doctor was going off-duty and was a girl, and everyone went, phew, no foreskin.

I didn’t know I was a girl. I was just me. My brothers were three years older, and we were all the same-but-different. You know?  We all had different names, and we all looked a bit different, and they were older, but we were all just kids.

How do you know when you’re a girl? You know when you’re about four, and someone buys you a doll. I can’t tell you how vile this thing was. Big plastic face, hard plastic body, spooky eyes, black nylon hair. A ‘baby’, apparently, but it looked nothing like a baby. Anyway, what did I want with a baby? I was four. I rejected it straight away.  And mum was embarrassed because it was a gift, and the visitor was still in the room. Apparently, I was supposed to cuddle it? I can tell you it was not cuddly. It was hard and cold and didn’t even bend at the elbow. Bits of it just stuck into you. I was told I had to give it a name. I called it Horrid. My mum apologised to her friend and named it Jane. While they were talking, I took Jane out onto the patio. I cut her hair short and stabbed out her eyes with a pencil. But I was still angry. So I pulled out her arms and legs, and set fire to her. Though I got into trouble, that pile of melted plastic is one of my happiest memories.

If ‘Jane’ was the first time I realised being a girl was annoying, it was not the last. My brothers got Matchbox car sets for Christmas. They were incredibly fun. They had loop-the-loops and all sorts. I wanted a Matchbox car set. I got colouring pencils. (Top tip: I sulked so hard on this issue that eventually, the next year, I also got a Matchbox car set.) Then my brothers were in a gang. I wasn’t allowed to be in their gang because I couldn’t throw a stone accurately enough to hit the ‘P’ on the ‘Cycling Prohibited’ sign. I practised for hours, but there was something seriously defective about girls’ arms. I don’t know why. Annoying. Even more annoying, because my brothers and other boys (I was getting the hang of this separation thing now) could say sneeringly, ‘Because you’re a GIRL’. Being a girl was an insult. And I was a living embodiment of that insult, and there was damn all I could do about it.

I wanted to do Woodwork and Metalwork at school, but wasn’t allowed, because I was A GIRL. GIRLS had to do cookery and needlework, which I had already learned at home. They made me make a pillowcase, but I could already make my own trousers. They taught me how to boil an egg when I could already bake a Battenburg cake. I wanted to make bookshelves. But no. I was a GIRL. I started writing (mostly about all the things that were annoying me). When I was fourteen, I won a prize. My mum called me in to show off in front of her dinner party friends, and then my stepfather said, ‘The creative urge in women is only really about wanting babies. As soon as you have babies, you won’t want to write.’ If I were a fourteen-year-old boy, I maybe could have punched him in the face. But my defective girl arms were as good at punching as they were at throwing, so I just went away thinking, ‘I’ll show him,’ and that pretty much fuelled the next thirty years of my writing career. And then, dammit, if I didn’t start turning into a WOMAN!  Which is, honestly, even worse than a girl.

How do you know when you’re a woman? 

When you can’t walk down the road to buy a loaf of bread without men saying rude things about your body. When people laugh at you when you say you want to be a computer programmer. When you can’t take that shortcut because of the flasher. When you bleed through your clothes in public. When you’re buying a computer with money you saved for months, but the salesman ignores you and talks to your boyfriend, and they just get really chummy as the boyfriend relays all the tech spec stuff you just told him, which he doesn’t have a clue about. When you can’t go running in the daylight because men make humiliating comments. When you can’t go running at night because it isn’t safe. When you’re left out of statistics, medical studies, clothing design, and car safety tests (see ‘Default Male’). When you’re with interesting people, and you want to talk about interesting things, but for some reason, because you have a womb? am I getting this right? you’re expected to go into the kitchen and make food. When you have to deal, once a month, for years, with pain so strong it makes you pass out in the street.

That was the eighties and nineties. And in Britain. I had it easy, not living in Iran or any of the hundreds of places where women are ground even harder underfoot. It got better for a bit. And now it’s getting worse. A lot of people are saying bad things about feminism, and sneering at women for wanting to be treated with a basic modicum of respect.

Feminism comes in many stripes (not all of which I agree with), but the underlying principle is this: one half of the population should not be subordinated by the other half based on something they had no say in. Women are not support animals. We are not Nature’s servant class. Feminism is, in the words of Mary Shear, “the radical notion that women are people”. If you would not argue for slavery, do not argue against feminism.

I want International Women’s Day to “do one” because I’m sick of being reminded of how far we still have to go (in this country, and even further worldwide) before women will be considered equally valuable human beings, whose words, wishes and needs are as important as men’s. Despite our defective arms, and our annoyingly attractive curves. Despite our ability to express a range of emotions besides anger. Despite our miraculous but unasked-for ability to grow a brand-new human being inside our bodies. Which makes us, let’s credit it, responsible for the creation of the whole of the human race.

Happy International Women’s Day. Show some respect.

Make a gal feel loved. Press the heart! And also…

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Wealth.

I want you to sit with the word for a moment. How does it feel? Contaminated? Does your stomach clench?

Say it out loud. Wealth. Does it feel like you’re spitting out a three-day-old piece of ham you forgot to refrigerate? Do your lips twist with disgust as it escapes?

On a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 is ‘I’m really comfortable with this word, it feels like sunshine and honey’, and 0 is ‘please do not feed me dogshit!’, where does ‘wealth’ sit? Make a note of that number.

Now rate your financial well-being.

On a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is ‘I’m homeless or afraid I’m about to be’, and 10 is ‘there is always enough money in my life’, what’s your number? Again, make a note of it.

How close are these numbers? I’m betting they’re pretty close. And that’s not a coincidence. If you think wealth is evil, and you are not, you are probably struggling financially.

But what if you could change this and do some good in the world?

My stepfather, may the god of nudist GPs rest his soul, was a wealthy man. He was also a mean man. That was pretty much how he got wealthy. Sure, he made some shrewd investments, but he wouldn’t have had anything to invest had he not been mean. Don’t get me wrong, in his latter years, he showered my stepsisters with significant cash gifts because he was trying to minimise his inheritance tax. And hands up, he gave me a grand when I got married just after my mother died (her death having softened him up a bit) and in the same era, lent me £10K (though he made absolutely sure it got repaid). But over the ten years I lived with him, aged 8 to 18, when my brain was at its most malleable, and my ideas about money were forming, this future multi-millionnaire was as mean as a single-serving sachet of ketchup.

A fitting metaphor, since food was his central tool of meanness. To protect his wealth, he didn’t combine finances with my mother (a part-time special needs teacher) during their 30-year marriage. When, in the wake of my mother’s death, my sister and I went to clear some of her things, there was a cheque from her sitting on his desk, made out to him, paying for her half of the holiday she died on.

Mum raised the four of us on a very strict budget under the regime I came to call Food Apartheid: lashings of expensive food for him, limited amounts of cheap food for us. Every day for ten years, I got to witness how Wealth eats — expensive cuts of meat and every single delicacy he desired — vs non-wealth (us kids): bread and jam. Not all the jams, either. Full details, and a related poem here:

A lot of psychological damage was done to me in those ten years, and I knew it, too. So you can be sure that by the time I was an adult, I was never going to be anything like my stepfather. And that included being wealthy. Because, to my mind, wealth went hand in hand with being mean.

Then I married a fellow computer programmer who, when I met him, was in debt (whereas I managed my finances very responsibly). Only once we were married did I discover he was completely obsessed with money, above everything else (including the happiness of his wife and children; I became the indentured servant who helped make him rich). So I found myself living with someone who was wealthy and, once the mask was off, psychopathically cruel. When he offered me half a million pounds to stay with him, I said, ‘I’d rather be happy and poor.’ Full story here:

By this time, my mid-thirties, wealth was fully associated with misery. Wealthy people were evil bastards who got rich through selfishness, greed and cruelty. Clearly, I would, on some level, do anything not be one of them.

Hence, a life in the arts.

BUT. Despite the pervasive trope of ‘the starving artist,’ and a reality that has never been less conducive to making a living through creativity, not all artists and writers from humble beginnings remain poverty-stricken. And against the apparent odds, I have successfully navigated the writing life (with a lot of creative writing teaching work and a fair number of grants) to raise four children as the sole breadwinner of my family. Despite the ‘poor artist’ trope, and a relentlessly red-lining bank account, I live in an amazing house in an expensive part of England. Whenever I thought the whole business was about to collapse, money arrived. The universe has fully supported me in doing what I love, even though it looked impossible. Somehow, I have made this writer’s life work for 28 years.

The key to making it work has been manifestation. Though I have a science background, I know enough about quantum weirdness to appreciate the truth of ‘more things in heaven and earth… than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ I’m also enough of a scientist to conduct experiments rather than dismiss things outright, and have repeatedly discovered that this shit works, so long as you complete the correct energetic steps and don’t just chant bullshit affirmations in the mirror. See also:

I have repeatedly shown myself that we can, without question, change our financial outlook with our thoughts. Or more accurately, with the feelings we attach to those thoughts. A positive, joyful attitude to money and an expectation of receiving it will bring it bounding towards us like a big golden Labrador puppy. I just wish I hadn’t, after each big money puppy bounced into my life, locked the metaphorical dog flap to prevent myself from becoming that despicable thing, ‘wealthy.’

Since being made redundant from my position as Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing 18 months ago, my cash flow has been sufficiently perilous to severely disrupt my sleep most nights. Several projects I hoped would correct my slide into debt have only partially materialised.

Throughout this time, I have done some course correction, vibrationally; that is, I have, many mornings, used EFT tapping to diminish my fears about losing my beloved house, and remain buoyant about the prospect of more money coming in. I have massively improved my ‘worthy-deservingness’ quotient (which keeps a lot of people in penury, in my experience) and my belief that money can come from anywhere, not just through hard work. And sometimes, proving that point, a long-time supporter sends me hundred-dollar bills through the post. But I am balancing on a financial knife-edge.

I figure this is all for my growth. I am now, in gaming terms, at the ‘final boss level’ challenge.

So a month ago, I decided every morning is a ‘tapping on finances’ morning. Time to finally slay this dragon that has haunted me ever since I left the abusive first husband, who successfully transformed me from high-earning programmer to penniless artist. Time to put a stop to the pattern where I am constantly riding the peaks and troughs of plenty and debt. Time to shift from specific ‘asks’ at times of need to a life of financial freedom. Whatever it takes, I decided. Full commitment. Remove every block.

And the major block I’ve discovered is contained in my feeling about the word ‘wealth’.

Words have huge power. Why do you think so many spiritual people ask for ‘abundance’ rather than wealth? Even using the word ‘money’ feels like an icky (money-grubbing) thing to do. Ah, abundance! We speak about ‘abundance’ and envisage wheat in a field; talk about money flowing in and out as naturally as the air we breathe. ‘Abundance’ is comfortable because it’s natural and morally neutral. I’ve been trying that shit for years. And little wonder that it was only partially successful; that though I’ve done amazingly well for a creative person, never well enough to live for any length of time without anxiety. It’s a rollercoaster ride around the zero line, dizzingly above, then terrifyingly below. If I can’t get comfortable with being ‘wealthy’, I will never stabilise this ride.

It’s difficult for good people to want to join the wealthy.

I get it. Look at the Epstein files. Wealthy evil people, right? Look what they did with their money. Rape children. Destroy lives. Kill some of those kids, probably. But the men who raped Gisele Pelicot weren’t wealthy. Epstein and Pelicot: this is just rape culture. Patriarchy in action. It has nothing to do with wealth. Andrew Tate is wealthy, sure, but we can be sure an awful lot of his followers are spewing hateful rhetoric from their mother’s basement. Misogyny isn’t correlated with credit score.

Here is my contention:

If we want a better world, we must stop thinking wealthy means evil.

Unless you’re in the position and of the inclination to live self-sufficiently, off-grid, with very little, money is an essential tool of personal freedom. It’s also, undoubtedly, a form of power. And we have all been disempowered enough.

If you are a good-hearted person, this is what you can do with wealth:

• Free yourself up to spend your time doing what you love and are good at. If you’ve spent a good portion of your life getting really good at something that brings you joy and brings joy to others (writing, music, art, looking after animals or the planet), wealth means you can stop slogging to pay the bills, and just focus on that beneficial thing

• Support the arts and artists: help to proliferate fundamentally human, soul-nourishing, inspirational arts, to the great benefit of everyone

• Support good causes: domestic violence charities, homeless shelters, educational charities, refugee and migrant support

• Set up new charities (my idea: one that offers free EFT to the homeless, to abuse survivors, and anyone else without the money to heal their wounds)

• Fund political candidates who are principled and not prone to raping people. Yep, I mean women. For an inspiring, principled woman, see, for example, this terrific speech by freshly elected plumber/plasterer Hannah Spencer.

This is the vision I tap towards every morning now. Not 'abundance.' Wealth. The real thing, used well.

And despite how difficult it can be (as mentioned above) for good people to get comfortable enough with wealth that they will allow themselves to be wealthy, here is something that’s true:

It’s easier to make good people rich than make rich people good.

So if you are not wealthy, but you are a decent human being, and you would love to

• be free of financial anxiety

• donate to good causes

• indulge your love of creativity or community or animals or the planet

maybe it’s time to change your relationship with the word “wealth.”

Because the world doesn't need more wealthy arseholes. It needs more of us.

And here, with magnificent irony, you've hit the paywall. The practical tools for shifting your relationship with wealth live below it. I appreciate that some of you are reading this thinking 'I would go paid but I can't afford it' — which is, you'll notice, exactly the problem we're solving. My paid subscribers are, in the most literal sense, funding this work while I write my memoir. If you'd like to join them — and pick up some tools for inviting more money into your life in the process — well. The universe would consider that elegant.

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Okay, so “Randy Andy” has been released from custody after twelve hours of questioning, rather than being sent to the Tower to have his eyes pecked out by ravens (obviously), but he was arrested, and that was the surprise birthday present none of us expected. Sure, it was on “suspicion of misconduct in public office” rather than raping children, but I figure this is like prosecuting Al Capone for tax evasion. If you’re going to arrest the King of Britain’s brother, you’d better make damn sure you have some charges that will stick.

And we all know how hard it is to make rape charges stick.

When your evidence is a couple of still photos with no context (I mean, maybe this barely post-pubescent girl had passed out from too many Sherbet Dip Dabs and he was looming over her with avuncular concern?) When your evidence is the (come on, as useless as a toy in a cereal packet) testimony of women and girls. When rape victims are never believed the way other crime victims are (because, you know, sex, who doesn’t want it, really?). When the only young woman who could have nailed him (for nailing her, sorry, but language is my playground) was paid off and then, most likely due to the fact that rape victims are never believed the way other crime victims are, killed herself.1 When only 3.6% of rape cases lead to a charge and only 1.7% to a conviction. Yep. No way they were going to arrest him for that.

But no matter how frustrated all decent human beings must be at the slow-grinding wheels of justice, and how depressed at the sheer scale of depravity evident among the wealthy, powerful men who run the world like their own porn-soaked fiefdom, let me assure you: the wheels of this misogynistic shitshow are truly coming off.

Why? Because all across the world, birth rates are falling.

Nothing panics tech bros and right-wing politicians more than this single fact. That is why a candidate for the UK’s Reform Party has said childlessness should be taxed. That is why Elon Musk, who calls declining birthrates ‘the biggest threat to civilisation,’ has been doing his best to personally reverse the decline by ‘welcoming’2 14 children. That is why Nick Fuentes said last week that ‘The number one political enemy in America is women’ and that ‘every woman and girl’ should be ‘sent to the gulags’.

And for all that women and girls have been forced into subordination for millennia, and are made to feel powerless on some level every single day of our lives (online misogyny, sexism at work, street harassment, domestic abuse, constant threat of assault and now the sheer scale of depravity of our “rulers”) — we 100% have the power to change this.

Women are the source of all human life. Literally, every single day across the planet, women create the human race. Twattish men love to jump on social media boasting about all the things men have made, and asking, “Women made what?” This is my favourite answer yet:

What women are actually responsible for: WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, windshield wipers, home security systems, Kevlar, computerised switching systems for telecommunications, aquariums, malaria treatment, automatic dishwashers, computer programming, the first algorithm, the software that put men on the moon, compiler technology, COBOL, the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) that makes the internet possible, coffee filters, radioimmunoassay, space station power, liquid paper, paper bags, life rafts with guard rails, foot pedal bins, nuclear fission, Monopoly, signal flares, circular saws, retractable dog leashes, invisible/non-reflective glass, cataract laser treatment, chocolate chip cookies.

Imagine how much more we might have made if we hadn’t been seriously hampered by premium-grade oppression for almost all of human existence?

But the MAIN thing women have made, throughout history, that NO man can make, is HUMAN BEINGS. We are fucking ace at that. (Mother) Nature has ensured that there will never be a Brave New World version of reproduction: the whole process is too damn complicated for a functional human being to be grown in a jar.

So, pricks of the world?3 You'd better start treating women and girls with respect.

Not the fake respect you’ll accord a woman when you get on one knee with a diamond ring or give your mum flowers one Sunday a year. The real kind. The kind that acknowledges that you see our power to wipe out humanity within two generations, and recognises we are not your subordinates. We are not pets, playthings, slaves, or appliances. We are full human beings, just like you.

Because nothing can stop the declining birthrate until this is the dominant and respected masculine position. Because it isn’t "free love, pornography, careerism, the Pill, abortion, same-sex relations, and no-fault divorce" that is behind the declining birthrate.

It is the fucking internet.

And unless you turn it off, WE CAN SEE WHAT’S GOING ON. The internet has made it patently clear what a lot more men than we realised really think of us, and my God, we are not walking into that hellscape willingly. The internet educated us, and now it gives us ways to freely share stories of the tricks men play on us to turn us into incubators and indentured servants. Red flag a-go-go, fellas. Young, fertile women are waking up to your disrespect — and choosing freedom.

Defund the universities, shut down our career paths, and take away our phones and broadband if you want, but it’s too effing late, mate. The internet has blown the lid off this population-wide romance scam. Our eyes are open. The genie of our personal freedom is not going back in the bottle.

In the words of Korea’s 4B Movement:

I will not give birth to a life that will discriminate against my gender.

My own flesh and blood must not become a blade and turn against me.

If the world born from my body oppresses me I will not let that world exist.

Yes indeed. The internet is a brilliant contraceptive. Thank God women invented all the things that made it possible.

If liked this, say HELL YEAH! with an actual like ❤️, a comment, a share, and ffs if you’re not in my crew, jump aboard!

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Watch this recorded session on rewriting those unhelpful stories you tell yourself about you… or maybe, the stories others tell. In this session, we had a fantastic volunteer, Leigh-Anne, and worked with her on the first steps to fully banish her inner critic.

If you have problems with your inner critic — that nagging voice that tells you you’re not enough, not good enough, not whatever enough — you might find this one especially useful. But the practical tools taught here (specific approaches and phrases) can be applied to any persistent problem preventing you from living your best life.

Is there a personal block you struggle to move past? A relationship causing you grief? A habit you’d like to change? A pattern that keeps coming up—losing things, feeling h…

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Twenty-five years ago today1, my lover and I stood naked under a waterfall in Costa Rica and symbolically washed ourselves clean of the past. Past mistakes, past relationships (crossover there) and past trauma.

It was fucking freezing.

It took courage to put our sun-heated bodies under the chilly stream. But not as much courage as it took me, three years earlier, to execute the secret “flit” that would remove me from my abusive first marriage.

Not as much courage as what I was about to do next: say vows with him, and with the garlands of red ginger I had made in the place of rings, enter into a second marriage. Trusting it would not, like the first, turn out to be a trick.

This wedding, thousands of miles from home, and the celebration meal we shared with eight strangers, had been planned for only two days. Seven days earlier, we didn’t even consider ourselves in “a relationship.” We’d simply been friends with benefits, sexual partners for just eight months.

No doubt to an outside eye, the timeline was suspect. What had happened in the previous eighteen months was insane. But this was my life in 1999/2000.

• I was a broke single mother of three.

• I was in the middle of a legal battle with my ex, where he was trying (for revenge/to negate maintenance payments) to prove I was an unfit mother and get full custody of kids he didn’t care for (had never so much as changed a nappy; used them as emotional pawns).

• I was tailed by a series of men that I suspected my ex had hired as part of his promise that I wouldn’t live very long if I left. He had told me how cheap it was to have me killed, and only a little more to “make it look like an accident”. But no one would believe me, for quite a long time. People who knew me assumed I was paranoid, making it up, and the police (who were similarly sceptical) said “take photos of them”, so I borrowed a camera. It’s not great when everyone thinks you’re losing your mind.

• Taking photos of my “tails” turned things around. In one case, as soon as I got my camera out, the man jumped up and ran out of the cafe (where I’d arranged to meet a male friend), and I ended up chasing the bastard across a park. Another jumped into his car and drove off so fast that the driver door was swinging open a hundred yards down the road. I got the registration, rang the police, and they told me it was fake. But they did, at that point, put a panic alarm in my flat.

• Twice, my car was tampered with (confirmed by the RAC men who came to fix it), one time when I was due to appear in court.

• My car was broken into in the carpark of Ikea and the only thing stolen, making no fucking sense (until much, much later) was my friend’s 6-year-old son’s bookbag.

• Police came to see me at the nightclub where I was temping, doing admin, in school hours (great look, in your job, the police are here to see you), to tell me my ex was “a person of interest” on a matter entirely unrelated to my fears for my life.

• On Good Friday, my drink was spiked, and I was sexually assaulted. It was going somewhere worse, but through the grit I had learned in the last few years, I escaped by the skin of my teeth.

• That same Easter weekend, my ex was arrested at his house in front of our three boys, and they were taken to his sister’s without me being informed of the arrest or where they were until three days later, when he failed to get bail.

• And let’s not forget the full-on breakdown where an acquaintance attempted to have me sectioned.2 The friend who gave me sanctuary and refused to comply, later said of this time, “You were a pain in the arse. If you weren’t such a good writer, I’d have driven you to Beachy Head myself.”

Pain in the arse because life was bloody hard right then. Yes, I considered quitting this world. And yes, I found the courage to stay. But you can be sure, I was keeping men at arm’s length.

This woman had needs, though. So, a few months later, I entered into an arrangement with a new friend. What is now termed a “situationship.” The full story of how this turned around in double-quick time was published in August in the New York Times: do read if you haven’t; it’s fun! But in short, I went to Costa Rica for sex with a “no strings” friend and returned two weeks later, married. Given how things had been, I forgive anyone who knew me then for thinking that both of us were crazy. There were plenty, I’m sure, who didn’t expect it to last.

Yet today is our silver wedding anniversary. Neither of us can quite believe we have made it through the intervening years, but we have. We have woven a life together.

Our unplanned waterfall wedding came about because I thought I’d put our casual arrangement under too much pressure and uttered the words, “I wish I hadn’t brought you.”

He said in that moment his whole world collapsed, and he realised he loved me. We talked late into the night, crying, both of us unpeeled of our defences. By the end of the week, we stood under that freezing waterfall, then said some renewable vows.

His silver anniversary gift to me is a hand-painted necklace of a waterfall. On the back, in Spanish:

“Forever glad you brought me.”

A huge shoutout of gratitude to you if you are a paid subscriber. You keep me going. You help me keep faith that what I am doing has value and that I will find my footing in this salary-free existence. This January, paid subscriptions to How to Evolve contributed 100% of my mortgage payment and half of the household’s food bill! Bless you. May your toast be golden and the rainfall bring you flowers.

This year, 5% of How to Evolve subscriptions after fees is being tithed to Women’s Aid, a life-saving charity who are working to end domestic abuse.

If you can’t afford a subscription but you love books, you can show your appreciation by buying one of my books or, if you’ve already read one, leaving a review. Novels: The Marlowe Papers, Devotion. Poetry: How Things Are On Thursday, Material.

Other ways you can support me include liking this piece, sharing it, or leaving a comment! I read every single one, and I love to hear from you.

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I am deep in memoir writing right now: Part 1 complete, the next four parts mapped out with considerable detail and a lot of notes. I am putting my fingers in my ears and saying la-la-la about the state of publishing right now, while remembering I’ve manifested miracles before and can do so again!

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This chapter includes reflections on suicidal thinking within an abusive marriage.

You’re thirty-four. In the fourth-floor hotel room, facing the sea, you open the window. The January air has a bite. Behind you, your husband is shouting. His voice has a cannon-like boom that vibrates through your body. He is eight inches taller than you and five stone heavier. He earns hundreds of pounds an hour; you earn sixty a week. A spew of contempt rains down on your head. It’s your birthday.

You want to escape. Couples counselling didn’t prise open the hatch. You hoped she would give him her expert opinion that the marriage was over. Help you find a way out. But he charmed her. His words carried weight, while yours seemed as flimsy as ash. The problem, he said, is that we don’t have sex. A symptom, not the cause, of your distance. But she believed him, not you. Obliged you to commit to intimacy exercises. Unbearable twenty-minute sessions on the sofa with a man whose chain-smoker breath and belly repulse you. You are hungry for sex, but not with someone who despises you.

Then there was the moment by the pond. When you told him, Look, we’re both miserable. A whole year of counselling hasn’t worked. We need to break up, for both our sakes. His face turned to acid. He said those words you will never forget. Chillingly clear. There was no way out, unless you wanted to die.

Now you want to die. He’s ranting about how worthless you are. You push the window a little wider. Across the road, a man is battling the wind with a doomed umbrella. Wintry weather has cleared the front of tourists. Directly below the window, empty pavement.

This is where the free preview ends. The rest of the chapter is available to paid subscribers.

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Friend! Trust that this piece, briefly touching the dark, will come out into light. From trauma-through-recovery-to-uplift is always my journey in these essays, and I swear I’ll never leave you in the mire. And oh, how I swear! But that, too, is temporary.

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Not giving a toss. Or a fig, or a frig, or a damn. Not giving a shit or two squirts of piss. Not giving a hoot. Or any kind of fuck, whether straight, or flying, or holy. Not giving a monkey’s, or a rat’s arse.

Not giving a toss when making art is a glorious gift. To do what you feel like doing, regardless of trends/friends/the market. To risk falling flat on your face/apart/in love. To chance offence when you strip your sins bare, or plaster the entrance into your mind with swear words.

To put your work out in the world, regardless of how it lands. To put yourself out into the world, with similar balls. Neither of these things come easily, to most of us. But practice anything at all, and you’ll improve. And that includes not giving a toss.

Being ‘out of fucks’ is a meme of our times, especially among mid-life women. When you slide over fifty and female, not giving a fuck what people think becomes a vital tool for thriving in a sexist, ageist world. I have given fucks forever. I was beginning to think I’d missed my window.

But this last weekend, at the T.S.Eliot Prize Events, something shifted. Finally, I felt how it feels to not give a shit. To glide through a room of creative peers, some much more successful than you, stripped of all envy. Just happy to be there and talk to human beings, without any need to prove myself, or impress.

I used to attend the readings every year. Would sit there, mentally carping, red-penning in my head those lines I deemed cliched or pretentious. I’d wipe out whole beings (“Of *course* he’s up there, he’s the judge’s best friend”) and shut my ears. With the ones I found “good” I’d eviscerate myself with envy. Especially in the years my collections were published. Why not me, why not me, why not me? Then my friends and I would bitch in the interval. But this time? I had fun.

The Poetry World and I divorced after it ignored The Marlowe Papers. My instigation: “Poetry” didn’t care. I was miffed that a novel in verse winning major awards didn’t even merit a mention in Poetry News. I decided poetry and I were through. Still taught it, but stopped writing it. Stopped going to readings and parties.

For a long time those poetry nights had been eating me up. Attending them felt like self-harm. Backbiting thrives where pots of gold are few: the gossip, the cliques, the cronyism. Plus I longed for ‘A’ grade recognition, and was only ever an ‘also ran.’ The truth was this: I’d made The Poetry World my mum. Was playing this old piece of software, this script, which could only ever have the same outcome. Hungry for “Mummy’s” attention, naturally I got ‘Not now dear’ energy back. So I quit.

The shortlist readings on Sunday and the award party on Monday were the first times I’d visited “Mum” for 15 years. My friend was one of the judges, so I had a special ‘in’, a backstage pass. And I had fun. Some of it was great, some of it was funny, some of it was boring. No one was my enemy. In the interval, and after, and on Monday at the party, I saw people I absolutely loved. The real life Suzi Feay, who I wrote about so recently. No need to find your Inner Suzi when Outer Suzi is telling you “if you say lit fic again I will throw up in my mouth!” (love her). Then the biggest surprise, my former editor at Sceptre, Carole Welch, she who changed my life by buying The Marlowe Papers. These women felt like gorgeous, unexpected, personalised gifts.

And then there was some gentle comedy.

Long ago, when everything mattered so much, when I was starving for attention and hungry for fame, I met myself in a mirror. Same ambition, same age, and a poet. I won’t name her (but have Googled, and she’s also on Substack). Those days, it was Blogger, and I thought she was my friend. Online friend. Writer compadres. Two poets, ambitious, always in each other’s comments. The both of us publishing almost every day. Chiming agreement. Cheering each other on.

Then I posted something vulnerable. I’d spent three months on the first ten pages of The Marlowe Papers, revising again and again to get it right. But my PhD supervisor (a well known poet) at my very first feedback session, demonstrated, with surgical precision, how and why it failed. What hurt was not so much the feedback but the fact I’d been blind to the faults I could now, so clearly see. I posted my doubts, seeking reassurance.

I might as well have waded into shark-infested waters with a cut on my leg. My “Writer Compadre” went in for the kill. Yes, perhaps you don’t have the level of skill it requires, she said. A slip of the mask, and you realise, this is no mirror image. She is, in fact, your Mortal Enemy.

And it didn’t get better. Five years later, The Marlowe Papers was published. The novel world was jumping up and down with excitement, and the poetry world said pffft and my former compadre posted what she claimed was a ‘review’. She admitted she had only read the first 40 pages (ten per cent). The ‘review’ red-penned words and phrases she didn’t think effective, like I’d brought it to her poetry workshop, not had it published to critical acclaim in a six-figure-dollar deal. The gloves were off.

With the prosopagnosia, and the passage of time, I wouldn’t know her these days if she were staring me in the face. This is the joy of not giving a toss. You can make room for whole new people. Like the person I spoke to, late in the evening, her wine glass brimming, my fake-mojito drained. We’d applauded a woman our age winning £25K, and without any bitching, discussed the words and the work. She seemed a little war-worn, her face flickering with some unprocessed trauma, which piqued my interest. I asked her name.

And it was her.

My Mortal Enemy.

Except not, because things have changed, and I don’t give a toss. I laughed and said “Ah, I remember you from Blogger!” — could see she was stuck for a response — and turned to find another conversation.

My writing career has been bumpy. Lurch and stall, lurch and stall, like trying to drive a car with the handbrake on. No one to blame but myself; except blame is pointless. It yanks the brake a little tighter. So instead, I’ll aim to savour the flavour of it: the delicious taste of zero concern.

Not giving a toss is so freeing. It has been such a challenge for me. And I’ve never achieved it before in a literary room. But having tasted its joys, I hope I might do it again.

If you liked this essay, please LIKE it. Pressing that 'heart’ sends love around the world in tiny pulses detectable only to dogs, who beef it up in their glorious canine hearts, and beam it through their eyes, back into the world, with all the sweetness of caramel desserts.

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It has not escaped my notice that I like the word ‘dogshit’.

Pile in! Don’t be a Mortal Enemy!

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